It is a rath, a type of enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, formed by a roughly circular bank and ditch that once defined a farmstead or the residence of a local family of some standing. This one is subcircular in plan, measuring just over twenty-one metres north to south and around eighteen and a half metres east to west, modest dimensions that place it at the smaller end of the rath spectrum.

The earthwork has been known by its current name for at least as long as Ordnance Survey cartographers have been working in Clare; it appears hachured and labelled on both the 1840 and 1916 editions of the six-inch maps, which suggests it was already a recognised local landmark by the time systematic mapping of the Irish countryside began in the nineteenth century. Today the bank survives unevenly around the circuit. It is best preserved at the north-west and north-east, where the internal face still rises to around sixty centimetres, though the external face is considerably lower. Towards the west it has been reduced to little more than a trace fifteen centimetres high, and at the south only a scarp, a cut or slope in the ground rather than a built-up bank, remains visible, dropping about a metre. A slight gap or lowering on the eastern side may mark where an entrance once stood, a common feature in Irish raths, which typically faced east or south-east. The interior of the enclosure slopes downward to the south, following the natural incline of the hillside on which it was built.